Worrying About Worrying
Worry ruins lives, it wastes time, energy, and resources. It gives nothing back and saps the joy out of life. So why do we do it?
For me, I was ‘trained to worry’ from a young age. My mother lost her mother at a young age. My mum was 19 years old when she came home and found her mother deceased following a stroke. I can only imagine the impact that would have on a young woman - actually, I can imagine it very well, as my mother taught me to.
I remember her saying to me ‘Imagine coming home and finding your mother dead on the floor’, and I did, I would imagine it. Then we would cry and grieve together. When angry, she would yell ‘you will miss me when I am dead!’, and she was right, I do.
In hindsight, it was abuse, making a young child imagine her mother’s death was a cruel torment. It didn’t end there, but I won’t elaborate here. It may have been exacerbated by my maternal grandfathers’ death when I was 4, which I don’t really remember much about.
My unusual childhood was the foundation to my worry, I lost my paternal grandmother at 17 and a close friend when I was 19 (she was 18), so my fear of the death of loved ones started to affect my daily life. It was not unusual for me to end up in tears of a completely imagined set of events, complete and utter fiction, and rumination, and I would be physically ill with grief. Just by worrying about the death of someone I cared about. Something I had absolutely no control over, led me to antidepressant treatment than ran into decades.
In my 20’s I made the (in hindsight) foolish decision to take a job answering 999 calls, it was not an easy job, but extremely rewarding. To be honest, not that many people are as panicked as you may expect when they call 999, many are calm, like an autopilot.
I didn’t realise what would happen when I started working for the Ambulance Service. Initially, I loved it, I felt like I was really making a difference. I remember the first time I felt like I saved a life, a lady called in as her baby had stopped breathing, she was understandably panicking, her baby was starting to go blue. Using my training, I identified that the baby was having a febrile convulsion and followed the protocol to administer telephone first aid advice.
The mother followed my instructions, and the baby started breathing, in fact, screaming right down my ear! The mother began to cry in relief, as did I, then the supervisor, who I didn’t realise was monitoring my call at the time, was also welling up as she mouthed ‘well done’ to me. This was my first experience of handling a call of this nature. There were many more to come.
When you call 999 you go through to the BT operator, who will ask you what service you need, then you will be directed to either the fire police or ambulance and the operator will pass on your details to the relevant emergency service. ‘This is the BT operator connecting 999 call from 0121 123 4567’ if the caller is distressed, the operator can mute them while passing their details over.
Back in the ’90s, we were trained on what to listen for: signs of a stroke, heart attack, various types of trauma, labour, febrile convulsions, suicides, epileptic seizures, septicaemia, and respiratory incidents etc. These days there is a different process, which uses a system called Pathways (or at least this was the case 5 years ago).
One of my most memorable calls was a lady who called in after her husband had an accident with some garden machinery, where he had ‘degloved’ the skin off his arm, a frightful sight as the lower arm is exposed, skinned, however, while serious it looks a lot worse than it is. Oddly, the more serious the incident, the calmer people were, unless it involved a child.
Many of the calls were for falls, traffic accidents, heart attacks, strokes etc. Occasionally one would take calls for more extreme situations, people caught in machinery at work, or accidents involving children. They were thankfully less common. Obviously, over the years, I came across many tragic and upsetting situations. The things I experienced stay with a person for life.
While I have mentioned a couple of typical examples here, some would be too distressing to include. However, the impact that these situations has led to more worry. Once you have witnessed what can happen, it’s hard to unsee what you have discovered behind the curtain.
We all have various reasons for worry, some are based on experiences like mine, or through experiences of our peers, and let’s face it, our worries could come true. However, how often do they? How many times have you worried about a scenario, worried sick about something, and it not come about? More often than not, I expect that our worries are unfounded. People lose loved ones, lose jobs, lose everything, and go on to live another day, another life. They adapt and survive.
Rather than live with worry looming over me, darkening my thoughts anytime my mind stills for a moment, perhaps I can turn that worry into anticipation. Just as I can worry about the ‘worst’ happening, what if I flipped that to anticipate the ‘best’ happening? Why is that so much harder, why do we berate ourselves for being ‘unrealistic’ for thinking the best?
I did invest in counselling to overcome the effects of my childhood, so I worry a lot less now than I used to, however, it is a dark cloud that can take me by surprise as readily as the weather changes. It is easy to get stuck in our negative thoughts, and the current situation in the world is making worry harder to avoid.
When I did lose my mother, I made a point of being compassionate with myself, honouring my mother’s memory, and accepting that although the relationship we had as difficult at times, we both did the best we were capable of.
All the worry I have experienced about death has not prepared me any better, it did not take the sting out of it, or help me adjust to the empty space in my life. It just made life less enjoyable in those moments of panic and worry. Which brings me to one of my favourite quotes:
Worry doesn’t rob tomorrow of its sorrow, its saps today of its strength.
Do not let worry rule or ruin your life. What is the best that can happen in each situation? Let blow those dark clouds away, and see life for what it really is, a miracle. It’s a cheesy quote, but apt all the same, the past is history, the future a mystery but right now is a gift, and that’s why we call it the present.
Written by Helen Heggadon
Hi my name is Helen Heggadon, I am Age 49 (and ¾, too close to the big 5 0), I live in Devon with my husband.
I work as a Customer Care Advisor in a call centre for a large telecom company and have just started diving into the world of writing articles. I am a member of Toastmasters International (public speaking group) in my spare time, where I have participated in club and area contests, and helped run a workshop on public speaking to the Tilney Group.
When I was younger, I wrote poetry, more of a means of communication than anything else, I have never had any proper training for poetry, or any other kind of writing, aside from what you get in high school.